OUR INSPIRATIONS | Dilip Hiro

Dilip Hiro is a writer and journalist who published 34 books and contributed to another 18. Hiro started his career writing about immigration to the UK from the Indian subcontinent. Since 2001, he has published a number of influential books on Islamism and associated conflicts.Hiro received his Master’s degree at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

He is the author of: A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Middle East (2013), The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict (1991), Sharing the Promised Land: A Tale of Israelis and Palestinians (1998), Between Marx and Muhammad: The Changing Face of Central Asia (1995), Neighbors, Not Friends: Iraq and Iran After the Gulf Wars (2001), War Without End: Rise of Islamist Terrorism and the Global Response (2002), Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm (2003), Secrets and Lies: Operation “Iraqi Freedom” and After (2004), The Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and its Furies (2005), Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World’s Vanishing Oil Resources (2007) and, most recently, After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World (2010).

What Dilip Hiro Said

Iran-Iraq War

The French are openly helping Saddam in terms of weapons and so on and of course you see Paris had become an important player in that sense that Shapour Bakhtiar, for example, the last Prime Minister of Shah and the one who was in Baghdad and was blaming to have coup against the Khomeini regime in July of 1980, he was there living in Paris and, you know, and so Paris was quite well-informed and quite friendly towards the Iraqi regime and they sold Iraq these Exocet missiles which the missiles would skim the water surface and then hit the target.

The Soldier

And to the soldiers, ‘When you are shooting your fellow brother, sister you are shooting at the Quran.’ And he said, ‘Just greet the soldier with a flower, and open yourself to being mortal, and let soldiers kill as many as they want until the whole conscience starts to rebel against that, and that’s when the army will collapse.’ And that’s what happened.

Chemical Attacks

Iranian soldiers who are the victims of chemical attacks, well actually came to Paris and came to London. And when that happened, you know, that really was quite a shock to the people in Britain, in Europe, my God, Saddam was really breaking their law against using chemical weapons and going back to 1925 which Iraq had signed. And they were, he was breaking that particular treaty and using chemical weapons. You know, and so he started to use that on a small scale. And then, of course, the UN, because this went to the UN Security Council, they appointed their own commission and they inquired. And sometime in 1987 the UN Security Council called on Iraq to stop using chemical weapons.

US and the Iran-Iraq War

Now, because Iraq started to use Kuwaiti tankers carrying Kuwaiti’s flag which were chaperoned by the US navy and so the US navy I think once some mines hurt US naval vessel, you see. And so therefore the US called the reason or excuse to retaliate. So, the US navy itself destroyed oil fields of Iran offshore, and also they attacked their one of two ships and so on. So the US now got involved directly in this thing.